Businesses today are more reliant on effective call centre services than ever before. An increasing amount of business is transacted to companies over the telephone every day, and call centres are presently the only viable solution to receive these transactions from the customers in a concerted and managed way. At the same time, both customers and the workforce of companies are becoming increasingly mobile.
Considering the aforementioned, the prior art naturally features methods with which customers can access call centres from mobile terminals and call centres can access a mobile workforce. US2002/0006787 A1, “Pocket Concierge and multimedia, wireless call centre system and method”, presents a mobile application software and a call centre system that provides call centre based services to customers via a mobile application. However, this document does not address the mobility of agents providing the service. This document is cited as reference.
EP 1 185 064 A2, “Call Distribution in an intelligent network to mobile operators”, features a method with which call centres can connect to their mobile workforce. Mobile operators, i.e. mobile customer service representatives are allocated with calls from a call centre. However, these mobile agents need to register in the HLR (Home location register) of the cellular network in order to receive calls and mobile network infrastructure nodes need to be consulted in allocating the calls. The method outlined in this document is thus dependent of underlying cellular GSM network components, which clearly is a great disadvantage. The HLR is already one of the most congested nodes in a cellular network, and any services requiring availability from the HLR or other network nodes are very tedious to design and implement. A further disadvantage is that the call centre operator is continuously dependent from the network operator providing the cellular service. This document is cited as reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,785,380 B2 “Network-centric self administered call centre with intelligent mobile agent terminals” features mobile agents equipped with Jini™ protocol mobile terminals are offered various general services in a heterogeneous system architecture. The architecture relies on new Jini™ protocol by Sun Microsystems. However, this disclosure does not provide any solutions to controlling the availability of mobile agents, a critical issue in the operation of any call centre employing mobile agents. Quite evidently this disclosure suffers from a serious drawback. This document is cited here as reference.